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It’s common for leaders of sales teams to focus almost exclusively on short-term tactics and current operations while failing to think and act in a way that supports the longer-term needs of their businesses—and it’s hard to fault them. The biggest problem with a short-term approach is that managers develop blind spots around crucial processes such as recruiting, hiring, and training and development. This is a problem because it can stall a company’s scaling efforts. To prevent this from happening, companies must make core processes like recruiting, interviewing, and development a real priority in daily practice. As Aristotle emphasized a long time ago, “Excellence is a habit.”

This article reports the results of a survey of key performance indicators (KPIs) used by more than 800 sales groups across industries. The most common KPIs are closed deals and salesperson performance against quota, which, on average, firms measure monthly. But a closed deal is an outcome and lagging indicator. This article discusses how some firms deconstruct their sales conversion funnels to identify relevant leading indicators and coach/develop selling behaviors. Thus managing sales performance and not only reviewing quotas and after-the-fact outcomes.

In August 2017, Cumplo’s Founder Shea and CEO Kirberg meet to discuss growth and strategy issues faced by this Chilean fintech startup. What sales and marketing strategy will best foster the compny’s growth? Are changes needed in the product lineup? How and when should Cumplo begin to expand beyond Chile, to other countries in Latin America? The company raised $1.4 million in its first three years, mainly from individual investors, and then issued new shares for $3 million in 2015. By June 2017, Cumplo was debt-free, had achieved break-even, and had raised an additional $2.3 million.